


the world evolves with you

by sinagtala (strikinglight)



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, First Meetings, M/M, POV Second Person, Sports
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:54:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26101486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/sinagtala
Summary: The night you meet him, Dimitri is wearing blue.ARun with the WindAU.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 10
Kudos: 42





	the world evolves with you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shandygaff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shandygaff/gifts).



> For Shandy, who asked for a Dimiclaude [_Run with the Wind/Kaze ga Tsuyoku Fuiteiru_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run_with_the_Wind) AU, a request I was all too happy to oblige. 
> 
> This fic is probably most appreciable if you're familiar at least with the first episode, in which the main characters meet for the first time in unusual circumstances, but I've tried to make it so you can take the general idea and run (so to speak).
> 
> [Title.](https://open.spotify.com/track/44KCYw3T4BxtaJByz8ZPpt?si=9peuXc2kT6m6LJcdGgxm1g)

The night you meet him, Dimitri is wearing blue. Royal blue. Not pale noontime sky blue, not robin’s-egg, not the somber navy of Garreg Mach U. An honest-to-god, deep and vivid rare-fish-in-the-pet-store-window blue. Of all the things you’ll remember about this night—all the incidental details like the dead streetlamp outside the laundromat, or the convenience store being out of grape soda—you already know you’ll remember this the most. Dimitri’s wearing a royal blue windbreaker, and you have to tilt your head up to look him in the eye.

*

You’re getting ahead of yourself, though. Before the blue, there’s the yellow, filling your laundry basket close to overflowing. Most of it is Hilda’s, an armful of skirts and cardigans and old T-shirts from your high school she’s since stolen to sleep in, pushed on you when you were no less than already halfway out the door. You’d grumbled only halfway to the laundromat two blocks down, for all it was twice the load on the back of your bike. You hadn’t actually minded all that much, and she knew.

“That girl,” says your good friend Nader the proprietor, leaning by the driers. You set your basket down and shake out a sundress patterned with daisies, and begin to fold. “Three years you’ve been doing her laundry, Khalid. She got you doing her cooking and cleaning too?”

“Something like that,” you tell him, with a light laugh. And it’s true—you do Hilda’s laundry alongside your own more often than you don’t, and it doesn’t stop there. You make breakfast and dinner for the house six nights a week, pick up groceries on Saturdays, do it all over again. The only chore you ever skip out on is toilet cleaning duty, every Wednesday evening.

Were you to tell this to Nader, he’d probably call it industry (which it isn’t) or friendship (which it isn’t completely). At the end of the day, it’s just a means to an end, but you’re not about to betray yourself too early.

“Three years, huh,” he says. Lets out a long breath through his nose, and looks at you. “How’s the house?”

You look back at him, blinking. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” says Nader. “Your first and last chance. Every night you come in here lately I hear you mumbling, ‘just one more, just one more.’ I wondered if you might find some fresh blood in there with the new students, but…”

That’s the trouble with Nader, you think. Three years of friendship formed in these hallowed halls of laundry, and he’s started to see you. You don’t even live under the same roof.

“Well, you know how these things go,” you say. “Maybe they’ll drop in when I’m _not_ looking for them.”

Later, you will wonder if maybe you spoke something into being then, but for now it’s only a joke. You’ve got a knack for making jokes; you like to say it’s the one talent you have without ever needing to try. That sounds like it could be a joke, too, except it isn’t.

You’re an imaginative guy, but even you couldn’t have imagined your first and last chance would sprint past you right outside the laundromat, tall and breathing and not a joke at all. The truth is it’s hard to joke about anything, looking at him and feeling everything you had learned about running form in a prior life return as though it had never left you, not even for a moment. Looking at him and hearing your father’s voice— _speed up your rotations, Khalid, shoulders down, lift the heart—_ but more, and still more.

You don’t know his name yet. You only know he runs like he has the stars at his heels. Everything around you—the double load on the back of your bike, a stranger’s distant voice shouting _catch that thief!_ —recedes in that moment, to make way for the light. You can feel everything in you rise toward it, as though in welcome, every inch of the quiet street you’ve walked a hundred times illuminated.

In one breath, you’re on your bike, following. In ten, by some small miracle, you catch up to him.

“Hey!” you call out, gripping the handlebars so tightly your wrists ache, looking right into his bewildered eyes. “Do you like running?”

*

A little later, after he tells you his name, you will walk with Dimitri down the street where you live. You will introduce him first to Priscilla, the white-furred, bright-eyed, tail-wagging love of your life. Then to the house—to every leaking tap, every creaking floorboard.

The room you mean to give him is the vacant room 103, next to yours, across the hall from Hilda. When you arrive, she’ll be scolding Balthus for the thousandth time for smoking in the house. Dedue will be in the bath, and Hapi napping, and Ashe in the middle of a chess game with Raphael and Leonie in his room upstairs. You won’t be able to find Marianne, at least not right away, inside the veritable fortress of books she’s built. Later, you will knock on your landlady’s door and tell her, “So, Judith, that’s ten.”

When you come home with Dimitri and open the door to that empty room, you’ll find the windows already open, and the night wind blowing in, like it’s been waiting for him.

*

The running guy has legs for miles. You’ve been aware of this pleasant fact, of course, from the moment you saw him, but it really stares you in the face like this—the two of you side by side on a bench outside of the very convenience store he robbed not a half hour ago, him with his elbows braced against his bent knees, you leaning back against the bench. For all you know those legs could have carried him to the other side of the city had you not chased him down. Had you not been in just the right place at the right time, fortunately for all concerned.

You don’t do anything _but_ sit for a while, as he finishes the no-longer-stolen sausage roll and a bottle of unsweetened tea, paid for by your generous heart and the handful of spare change in your back pocket from the laundry. He eats neatly and quietly—but quickly, you notice, with the gusto of someone who’s been hungry quite some time. You tilt your head back, letting your gaze drift upward to the pale, light-polluted sky.

“So, why’d you do it?” you ask, without looking at him. “No judgment, I promise. I just want to know who you are.”

He’s quiet beside you awhile before speaking. “I’m not anyone you want to know.”

You notice he doesn’t answer your question. You don’t ask it a second time.

“Because you’re a petty criminal? Spare me.” You scoff and sit forward again, eyes leaving the sky and turning to him instead. “Here, I’ll go first: call me Claude. Claude von Riegan.”

When you offer your hand, he reaches to clasp it readily enough. His grip, you note, is firm and strong. Warm, too, and not just from the running, you’re willing to bet. “Dimitri Blaiddyd.”

“Dimitri, huh.” You repeat the name, decide it has a nice roll and rise to it. “Do you live around here? Where’s your place?”

“No, I…” A pause, and then a concession. “I go to Garreg Mach University. I’m a new transfer.”

 _“Garreg Mach U?”_ It comes out with more enthusiasm than you intend; you lean too far forward, into his face, before you can stop yourself. “I definitely can’t ignore you, then. Which department?”

“H-history,” he stammers, drawing away a little, wide-eyed; you pull back and cede the space. “Listen, I appreciate your help, but I can’t…”

The statement trails, broken in the middle, and peters off into nothing. Out of the corner of your eye, you take stock of Dimitri’s blue windbreaker, and the sneakers he’d raced the stars in—well-worn, well-kept. His hungry eyes; quieter now, but still burning with something you can’t identify. There’s a story in those things you decide you want to hear, that you know you’ll never hear if this is where it ends.

“You don’t have anywhere to go,” you say. It comes out softly, too softly to be normal for you—this is another thing you don’t intend. “Do you?”

“I… lost my whole apartment deposit at the poker tables.”

You don’t know what you had been expecting, but you’re pretty sure it’s not this. Gambling and petty thievery in one night? Wonders never cease! It makes you laugh, loud and long, even though he doesn’t mean it to—even though you don’t mean to. It comes out of you in such a sudden burst you don’t even recognize it as your own for a moment. So caught off guard are you by this young man with the expensive shoes and no money in his pockets because he blew it all at cards. How could anyone do anything _but_ laugh?

You figure that if nothing about you has scared him away so far, your laughter may not, either. It may even humanize you to him, for all you know, seeing you do yet another thing you don’t intend. Three times makes a pattern. As it is, that’s kind of a record for you.

“A gambler, huh?” you say, beating your chest with one hand as you catch your breath. There’s an ache you feel that you recognize too well, a small, sharp thing wedged between the ribs, like you’ve run too fast. “Well, if you’re up to another gamble, I could show you the house where I live. It’s a bit rundown, but I bet you’d like it.”

You breathe in, and the ache remains. You add, for good measure, “We have an empty room and everything.”

“I did tell you I didn’t have any money on me,” says Dimitri, quietly.

The way he’s looking at you, though, wary and waiting and perhaps even a little hopeful if you tilt your head and squint, tells you this need not be the end.

“Details, details.” You wave a hand airily in a way that you mean to be reassuring, even as you can tell from his raised eyebrows it’s probably anything but. “I’ll have a word with the landlady and you can pay up when you can. She adores me—I’ll make it work.”

For a long moment, Dimitri watches you, taking the measure of the offer, or possibly of the person making it. Or both, you decide, it’s probably both. The two of you are, after all, strangers who came out of the night, from nowhere. It could just have easily not happened, this accident of finding each other.

You look back with all the patience you’ve learned, these three long years, and wait for him—and think, not for the first time tonight, about the things you have and haven’t been looking for.

“Do you really mean that?”

You decide, in that moment, that it’s not a question for you.

“‘Course,” you say. “I always do what I say I’ll do.”

*

Later, just a little later, when you rise to offer Dimitri your hand a second time, you’ll walk home together under a different sky—one full of stars you can’t see, but trust in all the same.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Please watch Kazetsuyo kthxb


End file.
